Guided To Victory

Transcript

Alright thank you very much. Always nice to be put on the air with a friendly voice. I appreciate you fellas and gals at the various radio stations, because many of your my own personal friends and I never forget you. God bless you and thanks for being there. And hello radio friends! How in the world are you? You doing all right? Well bless your heart. I’m just so grateful for the privilege of sharing God’s word with people. It’s like having a vacation with pay everyday. Happy in the Lord and happy in His Word. Maybe if you struck a rough day today and sometimes those things happen, you don’t feel very cheerful and even having somebody else chuckle is just a little bit irritating, isn’t it? People say to me, “How can you be so happy so early in the morning?”, well it isn’t easy, but I know sometimes, when you just feel down, somebody else if it if he or she happens to be happy and chuckling are full of the joy, it’s just sort of a counter irritant, isn’t it? I know. Hey, if you struck a rough day, look up and say, “Lord Jesus see me through”, for He hath said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee”, and He’s right with you now and you He won’t drop you. He hasn’t brought you this far, I often say, hasn’t brought you this far to dump you now. He’s going to stay with you. “Being confident of this very thing that He which hath begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ”. God isn’t going to stop now, even though you struck a rough day, all right?

We’re looking at Mark chapter 3, our Jesus pointed out that Satan can’t fight Satan, otherwise his house will fall, then He gives this this great truth, that we just began to nibble at the last time we got together, “No man can enter into a strong man’s house except you’ll first bind the strong man, then he will spoil his house”. Satan here is referred to as the strong man. Now, what do you do in dealing with Satan? First, realize that you’re in a battle and that Satan is real and that he is your sworn enemy. “Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the devil is a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Take unto thee the whole armor of God said the shield of faith where with you be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one”. Burning arrows that he shoots into your soul. You need the armor in order to win the battle, but if you have the armor, and you exercise it with faith, and you have the sword of the Spirit the Word of God, when the dust is settled, Paul says, “Having done all”, that means on the dust is settled and the battle’s over, you’ll still be on your feet. You won’t be a casualty. You don’t have to be a casualty in life. Aren’t you glad that’s true? Hallelujah for that! You don’t have to be a casualty, you don’t have to be among those missing in action, you don’t have to be somebody that didn’t quite make it, you can make it today with the blessing of God and the power of the Holy Spirit and the authority of the Word, you can make it. When the battles over God says, “You’ll still be on your feet, you’re not going to be among those who’ve been beaten”. Yes, first of all, if you’re going to do with Satan, know that you do have an enemy, a powerful enemy who is much wiser and stronger than you, and the only way to defeat him is through God’s way as shown in Revelation 12:11, “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony and they loved not their lives unto the death”.

Three things that are involved in getting a victory over Satan and all of his hosts. First says, “The blood of the Lamb”, that is to say you place your faith, not in yourself or your own abilities, or your own ideas, but in the Lord Jesus Christ who died for you, rose again and who lives to be your living Lord and your intercessor. Satan cannot stand a reference to the blood of Christ and the Lord Jesus Christ who shed His blood on Calvary, “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”, that is to say they put their trust in the fact that Jesus died for them.

I was friends with Will H. Houghton during the years that he was the president of the Moody Bible Institute. We used to come and see him in his office and talk with him. He was such a good, warm, precious friend to me. He told me one time that you know of course, he started out his life wanting to be a success in show business, and told me how proud he was when he would come back to his hometown with his brand-new checkerboard suit, and his straw hat and cane, and all the rest dressed up, a real Yankee doodle dandy. And then God got a hold of him and saved him and the Holy Spirit of God began to deal with him about becoming a preacher. And he said sometimes during the night hours, Satan would come and say, “How can you ever dare to be a preacher and tell people what they ought to do? Don’t you remember what you did, what you said and the way you were planning your life?”, and he said, “I was really upset about that for some time and I realized that God had said He forgot it. He said, ‘Their sins and their and transgressions will I remember no more, forever’”. Only God, God is the only one in all the universe who has the right to forget. Did you know that?

Memory is built right into your bones and though every nerve synapse that you have is part of the built-in memory that God has put in your being. It’s a great computer that God has built between your two ears and every experience of all of your lifetime is recorded there unerringly. Only God is the right to forget, He says, “I won’t remember anymore”. “Thou has put all my sins in the depths of the sea”. One of the old holiness preachers used to say, “God put all my sins in the deepest sea and then He posted a no fishing sign”. (Chuckle) I don’t know if that’s Uncle Buddy Robinson, one of the old-time holiness preachers used to say that. So, the beginning of dealing with your adversary, is to place your trust in what the Lord Jesus Christ has done and so Dr. Houghton said to me one time, he said, “I finally said, ‘Satan, I know you remember and I know I remember, but the Bible tells me God has forgotten, they’re all under the blood of Christ’”, and he said, when he did that, wonderful peace came to his soul, and he went on about the business of preparing himself to become one of the great ministers of that generation.

They overcame Satan it says, “By the blood of the Lamb.” That is to say, they put their trust in the Christ who gave His life for them and in the pardon that God can give as a result, so that Satan, the great accuser of the brethren, can’t accuse, “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, interceding for us”, says Paul. Satan can’t accuse you if you’re trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ who shed His blood on Calvary, that is a first thing. Now, I don’t believe much in religious formulas, per se. I’m sort of a pragmatist and a realist and I don’t believe that formulas, as such are really all that important, but I have to tell you that many a time when I’ve been under assault by Satan, whether would be in some foreign country when I was ministering and I could sense the opposition of Satan or whenever, I have to tell you that many a time Bob Cook has looked up and said, “Oh, God I plead the merits of the blood of the Lord Jesus against Satan and all his hosts”, you plead the blood. What does that mean? You place your trust in the Christ who shed that atoning blood on the cross and your shelter then, is in the atoning work of Christ for you. Satan can’t get at you. Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint, the feeblest saint upon his knees. “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb.”

Then what? “By the word of their testimony”, now you look at the testimony of Simon Peter for example as recorded in Acts chapter 2, and you’ll find that the word of His testimony, well do you know what I’m getting at? Can you can you guess what I’m getting at? The word of their testimony turns out to be God’s inspired holy Word. Look at the sermon that Peter preached on the day of Pentecost. He says, “This is that which is spoken by the prophet Joel”, then he quotes from the book of Joel and he quotes from the Psalms, “David speaketh concerning Him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face”, and so on. The witness of Simon Peter and that of the other apostles in those early days, the word, in another words, the word of their testimony was God’s inspired, inerrant Word. We call it today the Bible. You want overcome Satan? Learn to use the Word. Jesus, our blessed Lord, did that in His temptation, did he not? Satan came to Him and he says, “Command these stones be made bread”, and our Savior answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God’”, then He took him up to the parapet of the temple and said, Cast yourself down. A dramatic entrance like that would make everybody believe on you”, and again our Lord Jesus answered with a Scripture, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord, Thy God”, and then, he showed, Satan showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and said, “You just worship me and I’ll give you all these”, because Satan is the prince of the power of the air. God has allowed him to roam this world during these comparatively short times, before he’s finally consigned to the lake of fire, and so he was quite within his rights in offering this preposterous offer to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the answer again was in Scripture, “It is written thou shall worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve”, and Satan departed from him.

You vanquish your enemy by the Word of God in your hearts and in your mind. Now, how does this work? We do the things we think about. You think about anything long enough and you’ll do it, and so to have the Word of God in your thoughts, will result in your actions being conformed to the word that is in your thoughts.The psalmist said, “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee”, and so, to defeat Satan by the word of your testimony, simply is, that you apply the Word of God that you know in your own heart. You’ve memorized it, you meditated upon it, God has spoken it to you by His Holy Spirit, that applies now to the present situation, whatever may be, of testing, temptation, discouragement, despair, whatever it may be, that you’re feeling this minute as part of the attack of Satan, you apply the Word of God to that. That’s why it is so important to be in God’s Word every day. If you neglect the Word of God you may, sure through your faith in Jesus, you may very well make Heaven, but in the meantime you’ll be a weak, and querulous, and worrisome, and defeated kind of an individual, because you just didn’t get into the Word and apply it daily situations. “They defeated Satan by the word of their testimony”. Now, I have to stop here long enough to remind you that it was the word of their testimony, they spoke it to somebody. It’s not simply memorizing the Word of God so that you may use it in your own motivation, but it’s sharing God’s blessed Word with other people. Your witness of Christ needs to be based on the Word of God.

I used to tell the young fellas in Youth for Christ, even if you’re called on for a greeting that may only last 30 seconds, put some Scripture in it so that it’s worth remembering in eternity. It’s the word of your testimony, God’s Word that makes all the difference. Now, we’ll get at the rest of this the next time we get together.

I want to show you one more point here, about dealing with Satan and we go on to couple more verses that have to do with that: binding the strongman. Remember friend, you don’t have to be a victim, you don’t have to be a casualty, you can be a victor because Jesus has already won the victory.
Dear Father today, guide us, keep us, make us victorious because of Jesus our blessed Lord. I pray in His name, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!